“Until about five years ago, techies and others who wanted a speedier, extensible, more privacy-oriented web browser on their desktops often immediately downloaded Mozilla’s Firefox to use instead of Internet Explorer on Windows or Safari on the Mac,” Walt Mossberg writes for The Verge.

“But those days seem long ago,” Mossberg writes. “Firefox is hardly discussed today, and its usage has cratered from a high of over 30 percent of the desktop browser market in 2010 to about 12 percent today, according to Mozilla, citing stats from NetMarketShare. (Various other analytics firms put the share as low as 10 percent or as high as 15 percent.) And Firefox’s share on mobile devices is even worse, at under 1 percent, according to the same firm.”

“After years of neglecting Firefox, misreading mobile users, and putting most of its chips on a failed phone project,” Mossberg writes, “Mozilla says it is working hard to get Firefox off the mat.”

The guy that started Firefox, Brendan Eich, was unceremoniously dumped from the company for engaging in personal, political activities that weren’t sanctioned by minitrue. So, he left and started the ‘Brave’ browser. See the following:

Just tried Brave. So far, it seems faster than Vivaldi. Definitely faster than Safari/Safari Tech Preview, Firefox, and Chrome. Again, these are just my observations. NO official testing were completed.

Safari has bee good for me, but I used to have every browser made! From iCab, Camino, OmniWeb, I had them all. Now, it’s just Safari and Olera on my Mac, Safari and Mercury on iPad. What I need is a great email program for Mac and iOS.

Yeah, I know JW, I didn’t want to take time to write so much about my email needs, I like Mail okay, but I do need one more good Mac OS and iOS email program. It’s just a special need for one organ I work with.

WHAT!? How is it possible that Firefox is somehow ‘forgotten”?
Version 3.6 was out in Jan 2010. In Jan 2017 Version 51. Thats 46 full number versions in only 84 months. Do the Math, thats a brand spankin new full number version release every 1.83 months!!! Firefox rocks the version number war when compared to any other of the browser sloths.

I’ve recently started to migrate towards Firefox and away from Safari, somewhat begrudgingly. Safari has been seriously problematic for me of late and I don’t know quite why. If fixed, I’d prefer to stay with Safari. Opening many pages at once (a bookmark option) caused the last bunch of pages to fail, seemingly a memory-related error of some kind. Also, I can’t get almost any video to play. E.g., youtube from the various Apple-centric news sites. I have no idea why it happens or how to fix…so I’m increasingly starting to rely on Firefox instead. Will never allow Chrome near my devices.

Using Firefox now. It’s still the best overall. Plugins and customization are second to none. Speed is comparable to anyone else in real world use — faster than anything if you block the most egregious ads and trackers.